🚀 go-pugleaf

MontanaTrout (montanatrout@eworld.com) wrote:
: Nader can be reach at the Center for the Study of Responsive Laws in DC
: 202-387-8030.


           * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 
           *                                       *
           *    The message below was forwarded.   *
           *    It contains a very interesting     *
           *    interview with Mr. Nader. Enjoy.   *
           *                                       *
           * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

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replies-->harelb@math.cornell.edu;can't read all newsgroups;thanks!*
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replies-->harelb@math.cornell.edu;can't read all newsgroups;thanks!*
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From: "misc.activism.progressive co-moderator" <harelb@math.cornell.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list ACTIV-L <ACTIV-L@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Subject: RALPH NADER (Ivw'ed): Corporate Power: Profits Before People

replies-->harelb@math.cornell.edu;can't read all newsgroups;thanks!*
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                CORPORATE POWER: PROFITS BEFORE PEOPLE
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           (Z Magazine (see bottom), Feb. 1995, pp 58-61.)
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Ralph Nader, founder of Public Citizen, is a longtime advocate for
consumer safety and workers rights.  He has exposed the misdeeds of
the corporate sector as well as the political system.  He is perhaps
best known for Nader's Raiders and for sparking debate on issues
ranging from the Corsair to the Dalkon Shield.

BARSAMIAN: Let's talk about the media.  What do you mean when you say
                                [Message sent.]

BARSAMIAN: Let's talk about the media.  What do you mean when you say
that the airwaves belong to us?  That sounds like a rather radical
notion.

NADER: It isn't.  The airwaves are considered common property, just
the way the Mississippi River is, for example.  Both legislatively and
constitutionally it has been affirmed to be a public property.  It is
controlled by the Federal Communications Commission, which is
supposedly the real estate agent, so to speak, for the people who own
the public airwaves.  The FCC then allocates space on the public
airwaves to radio and TV stations and now other forms of cellular
communications, etc.  We own the public airwaves.  We're the
landlords.  The radio and TV stations are the tenants.  They pay us no
rent.  They use our property free.  They can decide who says what on
our property which they control 24 hours a day.

BARSAMIAN: When the FCC gives out a frequency spectrum to a radio
station or assigns a channel to a TV station, what kind of citizen
input is there in that process?

NADER: Virtually zero.  There are renewal times, like a TV station is
renewed every five years, I believe, and a radio station every seven
years.  It used to be every three years.  At that time, theoretically,
citizens could challenge the TV station's license renewal application
before the Federal Communications Commission by saying, this station
discriminates; this station doesn't have enough reporters; this
station is not ascertaining local news needs; the station is violating
its public trust.  These licenses are a public trust.  They're a
privilege for these radio and TV stations.  Some call them a license
to print money, they're so profitable.  Under the 1934 Communications
Law, the radio and TV stations are supposed to adhere to a standard
called "public interest, necessity, and convenience."  Under Reagan
and Bush they basically turned that standard into a dead letter.  They
deregulated the airwaves, removed any opportunity for citizens to
realistically challenge license renewals, and basically gave monopoly
power to these radio and TV stations.  So it's the corporatizing of
public property under the aegis of the politicians in Washington, who
of course take campaign money from these same communications
industries.

BARSAMIAN: I understand that the FCC is now permitting multiple
ownerships in markets of various media, radio, TV, and newspapers.

NADER: That's part of the Reagan-Bush abandonment of applying the
standards of the 1934 Communications Act.  They had limits before
Reagan and Bush, much more severe limits, I think, like a company
could only own seven TV stations or a few radio stations.  They've
essentially doubled that number.  There is pressure to get rid of it
altogether.  So what you're seeing is a major concentration of
ownership by vast media conglomerates that are buying up radio and TV
stations.  Some of them own newspapers.  And some of these media
conglomerates are now controlled by industrial corporations, like
stations.  Some of them own newspapers.  And some of these media
conglomerates are now controlled by industrial corporations, like
General Electric and Westinghouse.  So that where 15 years ago 60
media firms controlled three-quarters of the newspapers, magazines,
and radio and TV stations, it's now down to about 20.

BARSAMIAN: While there has been a huge increase in what you call
circuses, media spectacles, sex scandals, rape trials, Soon Yi and
Woody, O.J. and Nicole, Tonya and Nancy, there's also been a huge
growth in right-wing radio talk shows.  What do you attribute that to?

NADER: It's a lot easier to beat up on government, because government
doesn't advertise, than to beat up on corporations, which do
advertise.  So what you get are people like Rush Limbaugh, who is
essentially the leading media coward of our times.  He doesn't really
allow many dissenting calls of any intelligence to challenge him on
the radio program.  They screen the calls very carefully.  On his TV
program, he sits in front of a thousand of his books, which are behind
him on a bookshelf.  He has an audience that claps on cue.  Nobody in
the audience is allowed to ask any questions.  He sits behind the desk
and he has no guests.  He just pontificates.  I think people will
start getting tired of him.  But he does illustrate that a right-wing
ideologue can be a coward and a monopolist of the program and snuff
out any kind of discussion and challenge.  But if a left-wing
ideologue ever tried to do that, he or she would never even get a
program, much less be able to have 500 stations to spew their views
across.

BARSAMIAN: Barbara Ehrenreich has talked about Limbaugh and these
other talk show hosts and she says their success is about mobilizing
resentment.  They've targeted white, working-class men who either see
pink slips or they're getting lower and lower wages.

NADER: Their principal appeal is setting powerless people against
powerless people.  For example, resentful white men who have been laid
off hear Limbaugh with his innuendoes indicating it's due to
affirmative action, to minorities being given their jobs, to all these
welfare recipients absorbing the tax dollars of hard-working
Americans, etc.  It's the powerless against the more powerless that
these talk show hosts feed off of.  Whenever I go on these shows, I
try to reverse the emphasis and talk about the biggest welfare system
in the country, which is the corporate welfare system, all the
subsidies and loan guarantees and handouts and giveaways that come
from Washington, tax dollars, to these big corporations.  There are
over 120 of these programs, and they dwarf the poverty welfare
services coming out of Washington.  Just look at agribusiness, for
example.  Look at the maritime industry.  They're all on the public
tab in one way or another, billions and billions of dollars.  It's
time to talk about corporate welfare on these programs, just to show
the contrast of how prejudiced these talk show hosts tend to be by
becoming essentially bullies.  Not all of them.  There are some very
good talk show hosts, of course.  And now Jim Hightower has a program
on weekends on ABC stations.  But by and large most of the talk show
hosts are extremely reactionary.  It's because that's where their
bread's buttered.  They can get away with it.

BARSAMIAN: Wouldn't it be irrational for them to even discuss
corporate power, since their underwriting and sponsors come from large
corporations?

NADER: Very irrational.  A few instances, almost every year, where
there's some sort of criticism of auto dealers, and the auto dealers
just pull their ads openly from radio and TV stations.

BARSAMIAN: What's the role of media in shaping and framing people's
attitudes?  Take, for example, labor issues.  The New York Times, for
example, has a huge business section.  But there's no comparable labor
section or labor news.

NADER: First of all, if you're a labor reporter on a big metropolitan
daily, you're down near the bottom of the totem pole.  It's considered
a boring, dull beat.  One of the reasons is because too many labor
unions behave as if they're boring and don't want to make waves or
produce exciting news.  So the beat has become extremely uninteresting
to aspiring cub reporters.  They have business sections, right? What
is business?  Business is the exchange of goods and services.  That
means business includes capital, labor, and consumers.  And yet,
there's very little labor and there's very little consumer news in
business sections.  Why? Consumers and workers don't advertise.  These
newspapers make their money on advertisements.  Their per-day charge
for the paper is probably 20 percent of the revenue, and the rest is
advertising.  And that's who they cater to.  And they don't want to
alienate those advertisers.

BARSAMIAN: Most of the coverage of labor issues is almost exclusively
dealing with strikes.  For example, there will be stories about the
inconvenience to, say, Long Island railroad commuters, about how
they'll have to carpool and they'll be getting late to their Wall
Street offices, or American Airlines passengers who have to reroute
through Pittsburgh or Chicago.

NADER: In some of the better newspapers they will have a section of
the story indicating what the basic issues of contention are.  But
picture the scene.  Take all the labor struggles of the last year, all
the strikes, all the work stoppages, all the lockouts, and put them
all together and they haven't gotten the attention that the baseball
lockout and suspension has gotten.  I cannot believe how many articles
every day are on the baseball strike.  And to show you the corporate
twist here, there was just a poll that said 87 percent of fans think
that baseball players are overpaid.  The question is never asked, do
you think the owners are overprofited?  The baseball players are
baseball.  When they see the owners making tons of money off
television and radio and food sales and ticket sales, they're going to
want their share.  Even in the area of sports, the fans are growing up
corporate.  This business of growing up corporate is so important.
Children are growing up in a corporate-dominated society.  So we never
talk about what we own that we don't control.  We just talk about
crumbs that fall off the table of the plutocrats and the oligarchs.

BARSAMIAN: About baseball: I did a program with Andrew Zimbalist, who
wrote a book called Baseball and Billions.  He's been describing this
whole shakedown process that the owners have been engaged in in
various cities.  For example, the owner of the Chicago White Sox or
the San Francisco Giants goes to the city council or the mayor and
says, build us a tax-free stadium with free parking and all the
concessions or we're moving to Tampa next week.  In fact, they're
getting all of this public subsidy, socialism for the corporations.

NADER: That's been going on for a long time.  Now it's getting more
brazen and bolder.  It's not enough that the taxpayer builds the
stadium or arena.  It's not enough the taxpayer gets a very small
share of the proceeds from the private corporate business running the
basketball team or the baseball or football team.  But now we have the
specter of Disney and Blockbuster video.  Blockbuster Video has just
cut a deal through its lobbyist in Tallahassee, Florida and through
several counties which stake out several thousand acres where they're
going to have their private government.  It's going to be Blockbuster
County.  They'll have their own police, their own taxes and their own
elections.  The only people who can vote in the elections are
landowners, and guess what? There's only one landowner: Blockbuster
Video.  So this is almost like corporate fascism.  You can be sure
that they're going to be close to minimum-wage labor.  The fact that
in return for the promise of a few jobs Blockbuster Video could get
away with this and then demand tens of millions of more taxpayer
dollars in Florida to build a stadium, to build the arena, and to
build the roads.  It illustrates the new corporate fiefdom that is
spreading in our society.

BARSAMIAN: I'd like to know your views on PBS and National Public
Radio.  As you know, when PBS was formed, the legislation was passed
in the mid-1960s, there was a lot of hope around the country for a
real alternative to commercial TV and radio.  How has that played out
since then?

NADER: Obviously there are always luminous exceptions.  Public radio
and public TV have some good programs.  Public TV has some very good
nature programs, for example.  MacNeil/Lehrer is certainly a cut above
the evening news, but by and large they've both been disappointing.  I
think they're both moving more and more toward the commercial model
where they used to take corporate money and just list it at the end of
the program.  Then they moved to put the corporate logo on.  Now they
give the corporation a sentence or two of promotion, like General
Electric or AT&T, so you can see where they're moving: into a greater
reliance on corporate donations.  They're not of, by and for their
audience, even though they try to raise $15 or $20 contributions from
their listeners.  So I think maybe to call PBS the Petroleum
Broadcasting System is a little harsh, but it does raise questions.
When someone like William F. Buckley can be on PBS for over 20 years
and someone like Noam Chomsky can't even get on for an hour, it does
illustrate that PBS will have long television series if they can be
company-sponsored.  But they've tended to be Ben Wattenburg- type
specials, Milton Friedman-type specials.

BARSAMIAN: Wattenburg has his own PBS show now called "Think-tank",
which has joined "Washington Week in Review," "Wall Street Week," "The
McLaughlin Group" and this whole host of similar type ideological, to
the right programs.

NADER: And imagine, Senator Helms is still objecting.  I don't know
what he and Senator Dole want.  There's no countervailing program.
For example, I've offered to have a Sunday program on PBS.  They're
not interested.  They don't want to rattle their funding sources.  I
think it's time for an audience network, by which I mean a certain
amount of time on prime time TV and radio, say, an hour a day reverts
back to the audience which is composed of people who, for a minimum of
$5 annual dues, can become members and therefore hire their boards of
directors, have their own studies, reporters and programmers, locally,
regionally, nationally, and internationally.  It's a way of taking
some of that public property, the public airwaves, and reverting it
back to a more intelligent, elevating level audience that controls it.
No Exxon.  No AT&T.  No other corporations with their clever
self-censorship through contribution modes.

BARSAMIAN: How is it, given the documented bias toward right-wing talk
shows on PBS, and NPR for that matter, that they both come under
attack from people like Helms and Senator Dole, Newt Gingrich, that
this is part of a left-liberal cabal?

NADER: First of all, liberal Senators don't like to be censors, even
against things they don't like.  It's part of liberal thinking
historically.  The right of free speech includes those with whom you
vigorously disagree.  People like Dole and Hatch and Gingrich don't
believe in diverse views.  PBS has some good documentaries, some good
theater, and you take what you can get.  It's part of the progressive,
liberal, lower-your-expectations syndrome.

BARSAMIAN: How do you break through that?

NADER: By an audience network.  By getting entire cable channels
devoted to progressive citizen consumer, labor topics.  If they're
going to give us 500 channels, let's take 50 of them and leave the
rest for home shopping and entertainment and sports and reruns, etc.
We've got to raise our expectations.  There needs to be a sense of
reciprocity here.  If we own the public airwaves, what are we getting
in return?  We're not getting any rent for this valuable asset from
these radio and TV stations that are making billions of dollars in
profits a year.  We're not getting any time for audience networks.
We're not getting any letters to the editor so we can get some sort of
voice feedback the way at least readers do sometimes in newspapers and
magazines.  We give the cable companies lucrative monopolies in the
communities that they are selling into.  But we don't get anything
back.  We don't get cable channels.  We get a very impoverished public
cable access channel in a warehouse with a camera or two and a bunch
of volunteers.  If we're going to be asked to subsidize big business
to billions and tens of billions of dollars every year, we've got to
raise our expectation level.  No more crumbs.

transcribed by E. Schissel.
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  D 1   Oct  1 Billy G Rhodes      (3,218) Re: Heath Co. Letter -DRAFT100
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 1995 03:39:17 -0400
WWW: http://www.lbbs.org/znet.htm
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